Thursday, February 17, 2011

new post schedule and Kid Tip 1

Hi,

I finally found out how to schedule posts in blogger. I had already decided to move the entire thing over to wordpress when I did. ;-)So, after a rather long weird kind of flue (I never became really ill with fever or so, but I was weak and unmotivated and found it hard to stay awake - not a good way to be when you have children to care for), I am finally back to blogging. Since I know now how to schedule posts, I will blog two posts a week. A short one about kids (Kid Tips) on Thursdays, and a longer one about the Science needed for wordbulding or knowledge about something else writing related (regardless of genre) on Mondays. Feel free to ask me what subjects you would be interested in. I love to hear from you.

Now, for our first Kid Tip:Fostering children is very demanding, but the reward is unbelievably cool (the love of a child always is). BUT if you plan to foster children, get as many informations as you can possibly think of.

For example: the parents of our foster child are both alcoholics (although they are very friendly and cooperative when sober). The mother drank during her pregnancy which we didn't know because no one had told us. When she started school, she began to throw tantrums like a two year old when she had to do homework. It took us a long time to discover that she was not up to the task. She is mentally handicapped through FASD (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders), the only avoidable disability in the world. As soon as we moved her to a school for kids with special needs, she was happy and began to like school and to progress. If we had known about this, we could have diagnosed her much earlier which would have saved her a lot of frustration. So, do your research when you decide to foster a child.

By the way, I never regretted it for a single second that we took her in. Her love more than makes up for the troubles we had.

Friends

About Me

Katharina Gerlach was born in Germany in 1968. She and her three
younger brothers grew up in the middle of a forest in the heart of the
Luneburgian Heather. After romping through the forest with imagination
as her guide, the tomboy learned to read and disappeared into magical
adventures, past times or eerie fairytale woods.

She didn’t stop at reading. During her training as a landscape
gardener, she wrote her first novel, a manuscript full of a beginner’s
mistakes. Fortunately, she found books on Creative Writing and soon her
stories improved. For a while, reality interfered with her writing but
after finishing a degree in forestry and a PhD in Science she returned
to her vocation. She likes to write Fantasy, Science Fiction and
Historical Novels for all age groups.

At present, she is writing at her next project in a small house near
Hildesheim, Germany, where she lives with her husband, three children
and a dog. Katharina Gerlach has had various short stories published in
Germany as well as a non-fiction e-book in US-Fantasy author Holly
Lisle’s “The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About …” series.